12 February 2015

In Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World, new this month, Masuda Hajimu reveals social and political forces normally seen as products of the Cold War actually to have been instrumental in fostering the conditions from which the conflict sprung. Below, he examines how the dynamics he identifies as having contributed to the pervasive global logic of the Cold War can be seen anew in our own time, when the “War on Terror” becomes ever more entrenched as the rubric with which we explain the world.

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Many thousands of volumes have been written on the issue of the Cold War. Many other “Cold War” products are available, as well, whether directly related to the history of the Cold War or not. If you go to the Amazon website, for example, you can find nearly 80,000 items related to the term “Cold War,” from John Lewis Gaddis’s history books to a Cold War Veteran license plate frame, to the new album from American indie rock band Cold War Kids. However, none of these books and items, with a few exceptions, dare to explore a simple but fundamental question: What, really, was the Cold War?

The answer has been taken for granted: It was a global confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, fought within geopolitical, diplomatic, ideological, and cultural arenas in the second half of the 20th century. The conflict began, it is commonly believed, with the conduct (and misconduct) of top leaders, such as Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and so on, and ended abruptly with the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s. However, such neat narratives do little to further our understanding of the Cold War, and even less to help us understand our world today.

When I began my project in 2005, I did not expect to write my book in the way I did, but, looking back, I think I was feeling uneasy about the ways in which the history of the Cold War had been written, remembered, and pushed aside. What I tried to do in my book, therefore, was to think about another meaning and function of the phenomenon we call the Cold War, and, in so doing, to deliberate on what it really was. Viewed in this different way, I see the essence of the Cold War world lingering today in our lives and thinking in this age of the War on Terror. In fact, to think about contemporary implications of my book right now is a bit hard and even depressing, because it is so deeply relevant for us, especially in the post-Charlie Hebdo world.

09 December 2014

Over the past several years we’ve had occasion time and again to turn to Bernard Harcourt, Professor of Law and Director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, for increased understanding of the policing of behavior, the “freedom” of markets, and the intertwining of the two. Harcourt is an authority on “broken windows” policing, a strategy based on the notion that attending to small violations—jaywalking, loitering, etc.—can somehow reduce the more serious and even violent crimes that we most care about. As Harcourt and others have shown, not only is there no reliable evidence for the policy’s efficacy, it also is an invitation to target people of color and lower-income citizens.

The approach stems from a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, but in public discourse it’s likely most associated with the NYC mayoral tenure of Rudy Giuliani. Under Michael Bloomberg the city made an aggressive turn to Stop and Frisk, a broken windows-style tactic that made its racial profiling explicit. When Bill de Blasio took office having pledged to overhaul the practice, he reinstated former NYPD Commissioner and broken windows advocate William J. Bratton, who reintroduced the more subtly biased broken windows policy as a disappointingly transparent replacement for the plainly racist Stop and Frisk.

Harcourt has also compiled important fact sheets on the grand juries considering the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, helping to demystify processes whose secrecy serves to exacerbate their perceived miscarriage of justice.

28 October 2014

In his NYT column today, David Brooks discusses political discrimination (“partyism”), a social phenomenon characterized by an increasing willingness to make moral judgments about others based purely on political labels. To Brooks, it’s a perspective that turns politics into “a Manichean struggle of light and darkness,” profoundly debases human interaction, and erroneously conflates the personal and the political. Political scientist Russell Muirhead, though, sees the potential benefit of partisanship even from the vantage of our age’s inflammatory political divide. With Brooks’s partyism in mind, and a hotly-contested midterm election just a week away, we offer here the Preface to Muirhead’s The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age.

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As a partisan myself, I know a bit of what party spirit feels like. I have been moved—by anger, by conviction, by hope, by affection, and sometimes by hate—to hold signs, to sit through caucuses, to make calls, to write checks, and to vote. On those election nights when my party was defeated, I have crawled early into bed full of woe. And I will never forget the nights when my party has won, celebrating with friends into the sunless hours of morning.

Perhaps this experience gives me a sympathy for those who find it in them to take a stand and carry this stand to the political world. From a combination of habit, affection, and conviction, such people stand with a party. These may be “passive partisans” who think about politics only now and then. Or they may think about it a lot and try to talk their friends into voting this way or that. They are also the ones who make elections happen—they vote, stuff envelopes, knock on doors, drive people to the polls, make phone calls, contribute money, design strategy, and run for office. They are the ones who cheer in joy and who mourn in sorrow on election night—and either way, steel themselves for another fight. If they are prejudiced, narrow, and blind in some respects (and they can be), they are also idealistic, inspired, and knowing. Partisanship does not entirely deserve its bad name.

It is hard to imagine life without political friends—those with whom I can take a certain measure of agreement for granted. But it is also stimulating and provocative to be with political opponents. They remind me of the mystery of political disagreement: Why would someone so decent and so thoughtful disagree with what seems, to me, so obvious, so true? Are they blinded by selfish interests? Are they heartless? Or… am I… not entirely right after all? What is it about the political world that can give rise to such disagreement? Party spirit is the starting point for a basic curiosity about political things.

28 July 2014

A commodity is introduced, global demand grows, legal access is restricted, a lawless black market thrives. This familiar cycle, a darker side of capitalism, is the subject of Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground, in which historian Michael Kwass locates the rise of the modern fiscal state and penal apparatus in 18th-century France. It’s a tale of smugglers, hedonism, and violence during an early stage of globalization but, as Kwass shows below, plus ça change…

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A high-ranking customs agent stationed in a remote border town agrees to meet a trafficker from across the border. The smuggler, who runs an illegal psychoactive substance from his impoverished country into one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world, seems ready to cut a deal: in exchange for a new life and clean conscience, he will betray his boss, a notorious gang leader the police have been tracking for months. The agent sets up an evening rendezvous on the banks of a river tracing the border between the two countries. But, as he walks toward the stream, gang members ruthlessly gun him down. Rumor has it that the man behind the assassination was the smuggler’s boss, kingpin Louis Mandrin, later captured in a pre-dawn military raid and executed by a draconian penal system.

This is a disturbingly familiar story. A global drug ring feeds a wealthy nation of consumers. Police battle armed traffickers in a conflict that onlookers do not hesitate to call a “war.” Although intellectuals deplore the violence and demand decriminalization, courts continue to dispatch petty dealers to an ever-expanding prison system. All the while, the flow of illicit substances continues unabated, driven by intense consumer demand.

This killing did not take place in twenty-first century Juárez but in the middle of the eighteenth century on the outskirts of a small French border town. Indeed, when we consider the peculiar historical circumstances that conspired to produce the cold-blooded assassination, much of what seemed familiar becomes strange. The customs agent was not a public official but an employee of “the Farm,” a private financial company that collected Louis XV’s taxes. The river was not the Rio Grande but the Guyers, which divided the mighty kingdom of France from the foreign province of Savoy, a mountainous haven for traffickers. The smuggler who set up the rendezvous was one of the scores of border-hopping Savoyards who served in Mandrin’s gang. Strangest of all, the substance that Mandrin and his band smuggled—and over which the customs agent was killed—was not marijuana, cocaine, or heroin, but tobacco, a new drug from America.

03 July 2014

What if America’s founding fathers were stirred to revolution by their treatment at the hands of the British Parliament, not the Crown? What if they actually wanted firmer control in the hands of a single monarch, and took up arms initially in the name of the king? And declared independence from his “tyranny” only after George III refused to wield the power they offered? And wrote the American constitution with the problem of a weak executive fresh in mind? And gave the presidency greater powers than any English king had wielded in decades, merely shorn of regal pomp and style? So that, on one side of the Atlantic, there would be kings without monarchy; on the other, monarchy without kings?

In The Royalist Revolution, a radically revisionist account of the political thought of the American Revolution and its relation to the Constitution of 1787, Eric Nelson argues that these questions aren’t hypothetical. Something to ponder this Independence Day.

Teachout, who’s joined on the ticket by Columbia Law School professor and “father of net neutrality” Tim Wu, has made safeguarding democracy from the “corrupting threat of concentrated wealth” the first pillar of her platform. She discussed that and more with MSNBC’s The Cycle last week:

16 June 2014

With the eruption of an intense new period of sectarian violence in Iraq this month, the never-settled questions of American culpability for what’s happened and responsibility for what’s next have risen again to the fore. News analysis suggests that the American government was caught off guard by the surge from the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, but hindsight holds that a descent to civil war was an entirely plausible consequence of American occupation. As we again debate the place of America in this raging conflict, political scientist Michael MacDonald suggests that the common explanations cited for America’s willingness to risk such consequences in our war to topple Saddam are exactly wrong. In the below excerpt from an uncorrected pre-publication draft ofOverreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq, MacDonald details how America’s fallacious equation of its ideals with its interests—and global projection of each—led to this unleashing of chaos with no end in sight.

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Granting that the United States wanted regime change in Iraq, what possessed a generation of leaders to decide that going to war against Iraq was not only a good idea but a compelling one? Just because the war turned out badly for the United States obviously does not prove that it was a bad idea, but it does shift the burden of proof to hawks. The incentives of national security and neoliberal marketization might have been tempting, but the disincentives were stronger. War is costly, risky, and unpredictable, and electing war against Saddam made sense only on the assumptions that the United States would win, that the desserts of victory would justify the real costs and the opportunity costs of fighting a war in the midst of a region that was notoriously hostile to both American power and the liberal order, and that the new regime, which would accord with American interests and values, was achievable politically. The war, in other words, rested on profoundly ambitious assumptions about victory, the value of the stakes, and the prospects for transforming Iraq. Yet American leaders—and this is the pivotal point—scarcely registered the aggressiveness of their ambitions. If the United States was going to choose war in Iraq from all the possibilities that were open to the world’s sole superpower and the leading sponsor of neoliberalism, American leaders had to calculate that the rewards for going to war, after the costs were subtracted, were more enticing than alternate uses of American lives, money, and leadership. It is not obvious why they made that calculation.

The Bush administration is accused of using high-minded claptrap about freedom, democracy, and markets to sell the war, but the accusation gets the decision exactly wrong. The key to explaining the choice for regime change is that the Bush administration, and most American political and foreign policy elites too, subscribed to the shibboleths, euphemisms, and platitudes. They believed their fictions. The United States went to war because they saw liberalism as the answer to Iraq’s problems and because they expected that most Iraqis would understand that liberal values, which would fit naturally in Iraq, would emancipate them. If, however, these expectations turned out to be overly optimistic, then the United States was breaking the old order without a viable substitute at hand.

15 April 2014

Over the past 150 years, various groups of Americans have resisted taxation as a form of protest, acting out their anger towards the state over the issues of who should be taxed, how much, and why. In American Tax Resisters, historian Romain Huret highlights the moral, social, and political dimensions to this strain of dissent, which has been integral in the shaping of American political economy. On this American tax day, we asked Huret a few questions about those who’ve manifested their discontent with government by refusing to support its fiscal demands.

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Q. The tax resisters you profile in the book are remarkably diverse—from 19th century businessmen to 1950s women’s groups to members of the Tea Party. What strategies and beliefs do they share?

The main argument of my book is that they share a common distrust of federal progressive taxation. They believe that the main tenets of progressivity—“sacrifice” on the part of rich taxpayers, graduated tax rates, making tax returns public—threatened both American democracy and economy. They saw tax resistance as a way to protect their families, businesses, and communities. In terms of rhetoric, since the Civil War resisters have invoked both Constitutional and historical arguments against taxation. Each generation of resisters has reinvented its own language and actions, but there is a striking continuity between the businessmen who created Anti-Income Tax associations after the Civil War and today’s Tea Partiers.

Q. How have resistance movements responded to changes in tax policy over the past 150 years?

Until the early twentieth century, tax resisters hoped to abolish all internal taxes, especially progressive ones. After the Sixteenth Amendment (1913), which was a major defeat for them, all but the most radical tried to limit, rather than eliminate, tax rates and tax transfers. The New Deal and Keynesian policy made resistance very difficult after World War II, when even big corporations accepted progressive taxation. Then the movement was reinvigorated by conservative middle-class activists in the suburbs in the 1950s. Women played a major role and denounced federal taxation as a dangerous evil that undermined family values. Pamphlets, newsletters and books circulated among conservatives and shaped a distinctive subculture that paved the way to the tax revolts of the 1970s. That new brand of resistance flourished in the 1980s and is still vigorous today.

Q. How have the tax resistance movements of the past influenced contemporary movements?

Contemporary resisters know the history of tax resistance, and see themselves as part of a long and proud American tradition. In the 1960s and 1970s, you already had T-Parties meetings, tapping into the memory of the Founders, even though their audience was small. Today’s Tea Party is a very interesting case of intergenerational social movement, even though tax rates have largely decreased since the 1970s.

04 April 2014

In 1785, having spent several years representing American interests, Benjamin Franklin left Paris in possession of a parting gift from Louis XVI: a golden case adorned with the King’s portrait and 408 diamonds. Though the gift was in line with common courtesy throughout Europe, in the new United States such a luxurious present was perceived as having the power to corrupt its recipient. As legal scholar Zephyr Teachout writes in her forthcoming history of the American concept of corruption, Franklin’s snuff box was “a symbol of seduction, addiction, dependency, luxury, and the confusion about the relationship between politics, power, intimacy, and friendship.” In 18th century America such gifts were regulated transactions requiring Congressional approval.

In Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United, Teachout reminds us that the particularly demanding notion of corruption represented by that early gifts rule is central to American law and democracy. This notion of corruption, she explains, is not limited to the blatant bribes and explicit quid pro quo to which Chief Justice Roberts referred in this week’s McCutcheon v. FEC ruling, and Justice Kennedy in Citizens United before that. The foundational American understanding of corruption encompassed emotional, internal, psychological relationships in an effort to protect the morality of interactions between official representatives of government and private parties, foreign parties, or other politicians.

As the story of Franklin’s gift shows, and as Teachout details, corruption is not just a criminal law term. It plays a larger role in American history, that of a broadly conceived taboo policing the line between acceptable and unacceptable political behavior. Departing from European norms in an effort to constitute a society with civic virtues, the American founders created not only a new country but a powerful new political grammar built on a concern for temptation and influence, not mere material transaction. Inspired by Teachout’s work here, Lawrence Lessig and others mapped how the constitution’s framers used the word “corruption” and found, as Lessig noted in the Daily Beast, that it was “absolutely clear from that research…that by ‘corruption,’ the Framers certainly did not mean quid pro quo corruption alone. That exclusive usage is completely modern.” Complete modernism, of course, is a funny stance for the originalists on the court’s right to adopt.

Google Ngram showing frequency of words “corrupt” and “corruption” in corpus of American English books, 1700-2000

Teachout describes the laws meant to prevent corruption in American history as prophylactic, in that they were designed to clearly prohibit certain behaviors that may result in undue influence, rather than allowing them and attempting later to identify corruption clearly enough to warrant conviction. The laws, in other words, accounted for ambiguity, instead of imagining some readily sniffed smoking gun accompanying quid pro quo exchange. The latter, of course, is the approach apparently favored by Chief Justice Roberts, and so his court continues its reshaping of American law in that image, ignoring 200 years of judicial respect for public morality. In the absence of strict campaign spending limits the Supreme Court would have us rely on explicit bribery laws that would punish only lazy politicians if defined narrowly, while posing too much potential for abuse if too sweeping. “After two centuries of attempts,” writes Teachout, “no one has been able to craft a bribery law that covers something in between the two, because influence simply doesn’t work through contract-like arrangements.” And yet five members of the current Supreme Court openly prefer bribery laws to prophylactic campaign spending limits.

Teachout writes for a deeper understanding of the complex ways in which private and public morality intersect, and greater respect for the political dangers that flow from untethered self-interest. Her hope is that such an understanding will lead to judicial support for clear rules that pre-commit us, instead of judicial preference for after-the-fact punishments. She argues, too, for legislative campaign finance reform, making the case in yesterday’s Washington Post for a system that would take away the corrupting threats posed by unlimited independent expenditures while freeing politicians from begging “at the feet of oligarchs.” For while gifts from the King of France may no longer threaten, we have today our own lords of industry upon whom political candidates depend for contributions. What we newly lack, Teachout shows, is the deep American impulse to protect our society from their corrupting influence. Corruption in America will be published this September, a moment when unlimited midterm election spending will likely make American corruption all too apparent.

20 January 2014

Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice argues for the critical role of sentiment in the shaping of a just society, and the importance of consciously constructed public emotions. Patriotism—frequently maligned and easily abused—is key to Nussbaum’s study, throughout which she turns to leaders such as Lincoln, Gandhi, Tagore, Nehru, and Martin Luther King Jr. for insight into the cultivation of healthy political emotion. In the excerpt below, Nussbaum details the ways in which King’s “I Have a Dream” speech builds a national identity from materials “made available by history and memory,” inspiring love through reliance on songs, symbols, and rhetoric.

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The Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863. One hundred years later, its promise had not been fulfilled. Martin Luther King Jr.’s great “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963, is another formative document of American education, and all young Americans have heard it thousands of times, recited in the moving cadences of King’s extraordinary voice on the national holiday that honors him. Nobody could doubt that it is a masterpiece of rhetoric, and that its achievements go well beyond the abstract sentiments that it conveys. Its soaring images of freedom and revelation, its musical cadences, all give the general ideas of freedom, dignity, inclusion, and nonviolence wings, so to speak, making real people embrace them as ideals because of the way in which it cannily gets them to think of these notions as about them and their own.

Let us now examine the way in which King appeals to the history and traditions of the nation, constructing sentiments connected to an idea of America that is, once again, critical and interpretive, bringing forward valuable general ideals from the past and using them to find fault with an unjust reality:

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. . . .

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. . . . And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “inalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. . . .

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

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The Harvard University Press Blog brings you books, ideas, and news from Harvard University Press. Founded in 1913, Harvard University Press has published such iconic works as Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s The Woman That Never Evolved.